The present inventions are directed towards electronic trading systems. More particularly, certain embodiments of the present inventions are directed towards dynamic selection of a quoting leg based on liquidity in electronic trading systems.
An electronic trading system provides for electronically matching orders to buy and sell items to be traded. The items may include, for example, stocks, options, futures contracts, and commodities. Typically, an electronic exchange in the electronic trading system is used to match the orders. In addition, the electronic exchange provides market data to various client devices in the electronic trading system used by traders to place the orders. For example, the electronic exchange may provide market data such as prices for various items available for trading and trade confirmations indicating what trades have occurred at what quantities and/or prices.
In addition to trading single items, a trader may trade more than one item according to a trading strategy. One common trading strategy is a spread and trading according to a trading strategy may also be referred to as spread trading. Spread trading may attempt to capitalize on changes or movements in the relationships between the items in the trading strategy, for example.
A trading strategy may define a relationship between two or more items to be traded. Each item in a trading strategy may be referred to as a leg of the trading strategy. Once defined, items in the trading strategy may then be traded together according to the defined relationship.
Generally, a trader determines a desired price at which to buy or sell a particular trading strategy. Then, an automated trading tool, for example, attempts to achieve that desired price by buying and selling the legs at appropriate prices. For example, when a trader instructs the trading tool to buy or sell a trading strategy at a desired price, an automated trading tool may automatically place an order for one tradeable object to achieve the desired price for the trading strategy. The leg for which the order is placed may be referred to as the quoting leg. The other leg may be referred to as a lean leg and/or a hedge leg. The price that the quoting leg is quoted at is based on a target price that an order could be filled at in the lean leg. The target price in the lean leg is also known as the leaned on price, lean price, or lean level. Typically, if there is sufficient quantity available, the target price may be the best bid price when selling and the best ask price when buying. As the leaned on price changes, the price for the order in the quoting leg may also change to maintain the desired strategy price.
When the quoting leg is filled, the automated trading tool may then submit an order in the hedge leg to complete the strategy. This order may be referred to as an offsetting or hedging order and is typically quoted at the leaned on price. If the order at the leaned on price is not filled (or filled sufficiently to achieve the desired strategy price), then the trader is said to be “legged up” or “legged” because the trader has not achieved the desired strategy relationship according to the trading strategy definition.
Current systems, such as those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,542,938 and 7,599,880, may allow manual or automatic selection of which leg is quoted. The quoting leg to be selected automatically based on, for example, market direction. However, current systems may not provide a desirable selection of which leg to quote in certain circumstances.